When Worlds Collide in a Civilization of Knots and Symbols

When one embarks upon yet another timeline of linguistic divergence, one tends to expect something grandly outlandish—cultures that sing entire legal contracts or, perhaps, societies whose alphabets require interpretive dances to be fully parsed. Instead, here in a timeline of logographic universality, the great twist of fate involves the astonishing persistence and proliferation of logographic writing systems, those delightful pictorial scripts I usually associate with ancient China or Egypt, except now **everyone has them**. Yes, even here among the Andean highlands, where I now stand observing the Spanish Conquest of the Inca Empire, humanity has once again proved its eternal knack for taking a single idea and spreading it further than anyone asked for.

In this timeline, alphabetic writing systems don’t exist—at all. No Latin, no Cyrillic, no Arabic scripts. Instead, the entire global community communicates through elaborately evolved, region-specific logograms. Everywhere you go, you’re assaulted by a dizzying array of symbols, each a self-contained encyclopedia of meaning, nuance, and utter impracticality. Here in the Andes, for example, the Inca have developed their variant called *Khiphuglyphics*, a hybrid of the iconic quipu knot system and additional woven symbols. It’s essentially the world’s first 3D writing format, though watching people try to 'scribble' in it is as painful as it sounds—an entire treaty agreement can unravel if you tie a loop wrong.

The Spaniards, meanwhile, arrived armed not only with guns and smallpox but also reams of scrolls covered in the sprawling, artful flourish of *Logocastilian*. To my amusement, Pizarro and his crew still insist on presenting their demands for surrender via pictograms resembling a fusion of European heraldry and medieval doodle art. I watched today as an Inca noble attempted to make sense of one such scroll—apparently a surrender demand—but instead interpreted the clumsy pictograms as instructions for constructing a very poor wheat silo. (To be fair, some scripts here seem only marginally better than IKEA assembly instructions, so you can’t blame the guy.)

But what truly astonishes me is how *normal* everyone finds this mess. The Spanish conquistadores complain bitterly about the altitude and the llamas’ dispositions but scarcely give any thought to the fact that writing in Logocastilian requires a minimum of **eight years** of formal education. Their priests travel with vast pictographic Bibles, featuring 5,000 carefully inked images per page, each one meant to evoke abstract theological concepts. ('Here’s a logogram for divine grace. Note the tiny ray shooting out of the cherub’s eye—it’s crucial.') I overheard one friar lament that it’s getting increasingly difficult to find the right inks for 'divine damnation red,' as local pigments just don’t cut it. Global evangelism is, evidently, a burden.

And as for the Inca? They seem unbothered, as usual. *Khiphuglyphics* was already so unnervingly complex that the Spanish scripts merely seem like child's play in comparison. The average Inca bureaucrat can mentally decode a khipu strand of over eighty distinct clusters in under a minute—a feat that would reduce most European clerks to tears. However, I did notice a certain tension between the literate elites and the broader population. Like all logographic systems, *Khiphuglyphics* is absurdly specialized—if you don’t have rigorous training (or supremely dexterous fingers), you’re stuck communicating orally or crudely knotting your grocery lists. The result is that illiteracy remains rampant, with most conversations consisting of awkward negotiations over yarn diagrams.

If I may indulge in a bit of dry critique, the sheer irony here is that these competing logograms mirror each side’s conquest strategies. The Spanish, with their bold, sweeping gestures, are convinced their pictographic treaties and religious mandates will 'win hearts and minds' through sheer visual intimidation. Meanwhile, the Inca, ever pragmatic, focus on logistical domination—after all, it’s much easier to encode the location of food stores or troop movements in a quick strand of cords than in seventy-seven layers of doodle inscriptions. If history teaches anything here, it’s that sometimes a well-placed knot beats the most florid picture book.

Nevertheless, I've noticed a simple truth across my travels: logograms are inherently resistant to phonetic miscommunication but excel at introducing petty bureaucracy into even the simplest human interactions. Yesterday, I stumbled into a border skirmish triggered by an argument over whether a *Khiphuglyphic* strand represented 'fortified wall' or 'irrigation canal.' Hilarity ensued; people died—and I left shortly thereafter.